In the 1980s, over a million Iranian asylum seekers transited through Turkey on their way west, most moving through irregular migration channels. While much has been made of Turkey's evolving role in more recent refugee crises, this literature neglects the importance of the 1980s Iranian refugee migrations in shaping the global refugee system. By connecting the story of the international human rights movement to the Ankara office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this paper emphasizes the role of non-state actors. Based on research in the archives of the UNHCR, this paper argues that the UNHCR and Amnesty International used human rights as a tool to pressure Turkey to open its doors to Iranian refugees in the early 1980s, and that this tactic backfired when the West closed its own doors on refugees later in the decade. The result was the increased forcible return of refugees by Turkish authorities to Iran and newly restrictive asylum policies, which would shape refugee migrations through Turkey for decades. For millions of refugees, Turkey has served as transit hub on their journey west; in the 1980s, human rights hypocrisy made it a cul-de-sac.
Keywords: refugees; UNHCR; migration; non-governmental organizations; human rights; Iran; Turkey
In 1986, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Jean-Pierre Hocké, remarked on a new hostility toward refugees in Western Europe (Hocké 1986). Lamenting "Fortress Europe," the implementation of restrictive immigration and asylum policies begun in 1985, the High Commissioner identified a global shift from an understanding of refugees as people in need to "people who constitute a threat." With this shift, he observed, refugees "do not have problems, they are the problem."[
As the portcullis of Fortress Europe descended, the burden of harboring refugees shifted onto already disproportionately overburdened nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In 1986, refugees and asylum seekers in Western Europe accounted for less than 5 percent of the global total.[
From 1979 to 1989, millions of Iranians fled the revolutionary regime in Tehran and the carnage of the Iran–Iraq War. Over 1.5 million of these refugees transited through Turkey in an attempt to reach Western Europe or North America, making Turkey an international focal point of refugee policy.[
Based on research at the UNHCR archives in Geneva, this article argues that the connections that Western governments, human rights NGOs like Amnesty International, and the UNHCR made between human rights and refugee protection in the first half of the 1980s led to a Turkish reaction against refugees when Western countries adopted hypocritical and restrictive anti-migrant policies. When the West closed its doors on refugees, returned them to Turkey, and demanded that Turkey maintain liberal asylum policies on human rights grounds, those demands rang hollow. In response, Turkish asylum policies grew more restrictive, and Iranians in Turkey were increasingly at risk of refoulement, the forcible return of a refugee to his or her country of origin (Amnesty International 1994). Eventually, Europe's constricting refugee policies led to Turkish recalcitrance during the Persian Gulf War refugee crisis, followed by a restrictive new regulation passed in 1994 to consolidate control of refugee vetting under the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. While much has been made of Turkey's evolving role in more recent refugee crises, the literature—almost exclusively from political science—has not fully addressed the importance of the 1980s Iranian refugee crisis in shaping the global refugee system and Turkey's place within it. The 1980s are generally portrayed as a period of close cooperation between the UNHCR and Turkey, while the 1990s are considered a low point (Mannaert 2003). I argue that the problems facing the branch office in the 1990s had roots in the very events that prompted the close cooperation between Turkey and the UNHCR during the 1980s.
Turkey's asylum policy for much of the second half of the twentieth century might be described charitably as "informal." Uncharitably, it was a hopelessly complex, decentralized bureaucratic quagmire cobbled together between several ministries of the Turkish Republic, the embassies of Western nations, religious NGOs, and, at its center, the UNHCR branch office. Turkey was an original signatory to the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and the Turkish Parliament ratified the Convention in 1960. The establishment of a UNHCR branch office in Turkey in 1960 did not change the ad hoc nature of Turkish asylum policy, despite efforts to the contrary. The Turkish authorities responsible for asylum and refugee policy minimalized the UNHCR's role in the 1960s and 1970s. Until the early 1980s, the Turkish authorities did not involve the branch office in status-determination procedures for refugees entering Turkey. UNHCR representatives in Turkey repeatedly bemoaned the lack of a coherent, official policy on asylum in Turkey, especially concerning non-European refugees.[
Though the UNHCR Ankara branch office did attempt to improve Turkey's refugee and asylum policies, it was not a priority for the High Commissioner during the first thirty years of the UNHCR's existence. With the influx of Iranian refugees in the 1980s, however, the Ankara branch office expanded its operations and adapted its role in response to challenges surrounding the movement of Iranian asylum seekers transiting through Turkey on their way west. In 1983, Turkish authorities established an informal arrangement with the branch office, permitting the UNHCR to conduct status-determination for Iranian refugees in Turkey. This arrangement occurred after the UNHCR began to pressure Turkish authorities on the principle of non-refoulement. Human rights NGOs, the embassies of Western governments, and dozens of Iranian refugee organizations around the globe brought allegations of refoulement to the UNHCR as asylum seeker numbers swelled with draft evaders fleeing the Iran–Iraq War. The High Commissioner responded by strengthening his branch office in Turkey, sending more and more resources to the country at a time when the UNHCR faced a budgetary crisis and found itself constricting operations around the world. From October 1986 to June 1987, the Ankara Branch Office tripled its staff, growing from the second-smallest UNHCR office in Europe to the largest in less than a year.[
The Iranian exodus took place at a time when the human rights movement was beginning to enjoy increased salience, especially in the West. Recent historical scholarship refers to this period—from the late 1970s to the early 1980s—as the "human rights transformation" (Dunne and Hanson 2013; Moyn 2012). Human rights NGOs framed asylum policies in Turkey as human rights issues. Established by the vanguard of the Iranian exiles, Iranian refugee advocacy organizations drew Amnesty International's attention to Turkey. These groups framed their advocacy in the language of human rights and reported allegations of human rights abuses to Amnesty, the UN, and Western governments. In Turkey, Amnesty insinuated itself into refugee affairs in the early 1980s. In a 1986 memorandum sent to the Turkish government, Amnesty justified its interest in Turkish refugee affairs by arguing that any asylum seeker refouled to Iran was under threat of becoming a prisoner of conscience and of suffering torture or execution at the hands of the regime in Tehran.[
The human rights transformation also altered the strategy of the UNHCR. In the 1980s, the agency pivoted away from its staunchly non-political stance of the previous three decades to reframe refugee issues in terms of human rights (Hammerstad 2014, 112–119). As part of this change, the UNHCR actively sought to collaborate with Amnesty, sharing information and referencing Amnesty's reports both internally and in conversation with the Turkish authorities. Headquarters staffers viewed Amnesty as a crucial resource for the agency's refugee protection work.[
Human rights critiques of Turkey's asylum policy were effective because Turkey already faced widespread criticism regarding its general human rights record. Turkey's 1980 military coup and the period of martial law initiated by General Evren brought increased scrutiny from Europe. Turkey was banned from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe; negotiations for closer association with the European Economic Community were suspended; and Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden all lodged separate cases with the European Commission of Human Rights, alleging violations by Turkey of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. As evidenced by Turkish authorities' acceptance of the UNHCR's expanded role in Turkish asylum procedures, a human rights-based approach could have positive impacts on Turkish decision-making; however, as the West closed its doors to refugees, evident hypocrisy undermined the power of human rights rhetoric to affect positive change. Indeed, the Turkish government began co-opting this language to respond to Western critiques of its refugee rights record.
While one might assume that the injection of human rights language into the work of refugee protection would have been a boon to refugees and the UNHCR, the truth is more complicated. The global Iranian network's success at moving hundreds of thousands of refugees through irregular channels strained Western Europe's goodwill toward refugees while Western diplomats and NGOs like Amnesty brought human rights into the conversation surrounding refugee protection. As Turkish cooperation with the UNHCR increased, it seemed that the influx of Iranians might help the UNHCR to convince the Turkish government of the benefits of regularizing its asylum policy and fully cooperating with the UNCHR on non-European asylum seekers. Perhaps it would have. Unfortunately, the indifference displayed by the rest of the world convinced Turkish authorities that they were alone; human rights criticism from the West was simply a new form of interventionism.
Irregular migration was a major point of contention between Turkey and resettlement countries in Western Europe. Most Iranian asylum seekers entered Turkey illegally, aided by a global network of smugglers, middlemen, and Iranian refugee advocacy organizations.[
The migration story of one Iranian asylum seeker, Achmad, demonstrates the strange and labyrinthine migration routes taken by many Iranians.[
During the 1980s, UNHCR officials observed that "more than any other single group of asylum-seekers," Iranians made use of irregular practices to gain asylum in Western countries. These efforts were such that the "smooth functioning of existing procedures for the treatment of asylum-seekers" in Western Europe was "being seriously undermined."[
As the Iran–Iraq War dragged on, Western states became more and more reluctant to welcome Iranians. The Turkish authorities warned the UNHCR that Turkey could not handle the resultant pressure. An important breaking point arrived in 1987, when West Germany acted decisively to close one of the last remaining and most popular irregular migration routes: the so-called "backdoor to the West." For hundreds of thousands of refugees from Iran, as well as thousands more from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, who sought to travel to Western Europe outside official refugee channels, East Berlin was a critical point of transit. Here, due to a strange loophole in Cold War policy, the backdoor to the West swung open. As Western Europe closed airports and border crossings to Asian and African refugees, East Berlin's backdoor to the West emerged as one of the last best hopes for those seeking asylum. Smugglers facilitated migration from Istanbul to East Berlin's backdoor by coaching refugees, purchasing tickets, arranging clandestine transportation, and obtaining forged documents (Tuohy 1986). The special status of West Berlin made it particularly easy for East German authorities to push thousands of refugees across the border each year; West Berlin lacked formal border controls because the United States, Britain, and France did not consider the division between the two Berlins to be a legitimate international border. To avoid tacit acceptance of the international border, no official immigration checks were in place on the west side of the wall. East German authorities encouraged irregular migration through this route by permitting the entry of refugees to East Berlin as long as they paid cash for airfare on the national or Soviet carriers. Encouraging the flow of asylum seekers, the East Germans put pressure on their rivals in the West (Tuohy 1986).
By the mid-1980s, this backdoor had allowed the entry of thousands of refugees from Iran, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh into West Berlin. In 1986 alone, refugee arrivals rose to 43,000, up 45 percent. In the mid-1980s, West Germany took twice as many refugees as France and ten times more than Britain or Italy; in 1986, it spent over $1.3 billion on the cost of sheltering asylum seekers. Comprising the single largest population, about 18 percent of the refugees arriving in West Berlin via East Berlin were Iranians who had transited through Turkey (Tuohy 1986).
Public opinion turned against asylum seekers in 1986. With the 1987 election approaching, pressure to slow the arrival of refugees mounted. German officials floated tougher legislation and more restrictive screening for asylum applicants. In addition, they publicized in Turkey that, beginning in 1987, asylum seekers arriving in Germany illegally would be returned to their country of first asylum. Where once an Iranian could be smuggled by truck to Belgium or Germany, tear up his passport, and claim asylum, by 1987 he was more likely to be sent back to Turkey unless he could provide evidence of UNHCR refugee status.
The community of Iranian asylum seekers in Istanbul certainly noticed the publicity campaign against illegal arrivals. In September 1986, the West German government foiled a plan to bring 27,000 Iranians from Istanbul to West Berlin before the backdoor closed. The plan would have taken six hundred busloads of Iranians from Turkey through Bulgaria and Eastern Europe to East Berlin. The West German government negotiated a deal with Bulgarian diplomats, and Bulgarian border police turned away any Iranians at the Turkish-Bulgarian border who lacked a West German visa, sending back busloads headed for East Berlin (New York Times 1986). One official, whom the New York Times simply labeled "Western," described the emerging picture: "Turkey used to be a point of transit for the Iranians.... Now it's getting to be a cul-de-sac" (Cowell 1987).
When Western Europe closed its doors on asylum seekers, it created what the U.S. Committee for Refugees called a "pressure cooker effect" in Turkey. Iranian refugees found themselves in an increasingly precarious position. The UNHCR recognized that the irregular routes used by Iranian asylum seekers to reach Western Europe acted as a "safety valve" for transit countries like Turkey. With the swell of Iranian draft evaders seeking asylum, the only mechanism keeping the caseload of Iranians at a level tolerable to the Turkish authorities was this exceptional ability of the Iranian network to move through irregular channels. The immediate effect of closing the backdoor to the West was to increase tensions between asylum seekers and the Turkish authorities.[
The first warning signs came in 1986. Ankara instituted a new regulation restricting the cities in which asylum seekers could settle.[
The dual pressures of constricted asylum policies in Europe and a concurrent rise in the number of Iranian draft evaders seeking refuge in Turkey combined to make life increasingly precarious for Iranians stuck in Turkey. By 1987, the Branch Office found almost half its time consumed by attempting to prevent the refoulement of Iranians.[
The UNHCR and the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly blamed the "more extreme punitive measures" taken against Iranians in Turkey on the restrictive asylum policies enacted by Western countries.[
The UNHCR's newly political stance in the second half of the 1980s tied the agency to Western human rights critiques in the eyes of the Turkish authorities. As a result, Turkish authorities were more prone to view refugee advocacy on the part of UNHCR as Western interference in domestic affairs. The prevailing sentiment in Turkey—demonstrated by a 1987 proposal by the Federal Republic of Germany under which Bonn offered to pay Ankara to keep Iranians in Turkey and out of Germany—was that rather than assume a larger proportion of the burden by accepting more refugees for resettlement, Western countries simply sought to "assuage their moral conscience stemming from their own restrictive refugee legislation by making Turkey a peripheral repository for Western Europe's unwanted asylum seekers."[
Turkey responded to American and European immigration controls by flipping the script on human rights. Turkish diplomats and politicians used Western Europe's own human rights rhetoric against those countries that just a few years earlier had brought charges against Turkey in the European Commission of Human Rights. In 1986, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) spokesman Yalım Eralp told the Turkish press, "We regret to say that we have observed that several countries that claim to be sensitive about human rights have been displaying discrimination on the basis of differences of language, religion, financial means, and education."[
This new Turkish tactic of rebutting human rights criticisms with accusations of hypocrisy continued into the early 1990s, an especially low point for UNHCR and asylum policy in Turkey. In 1989, Turkey's prime minister, Turgut Özal, accused Western countries of applying a double standard. "The West gets excited over human rights in Turkey when Europeans are involved, but doesn't give a damn when Turks are the victims," he argued, referencing the recent influx of 100,000 Bulgarian Turks (Human Rights Watch 1991). In truth, the story did get a great deal of attention in the West, most of it favorable to Turkey.
The reverberations of Iranian asylum seekers and Western anti-migrant policies continued well into the 1990s. By 1994, after the Persian Gulf War sent over 500,000 Iraqi Kurds into Turkey and multiple crises in Eastern Europe and the former Yugoslavia sent tens of thousands more, Turkish cooperation with the UNHCR reached a new low (Kirişci 1996a). Amnesty International warned that "the protection of asylum seekers in Turkey has reached a crisis point" (Amnesty International 1994). Amnesty reported that refoulement of Iranians, Iraqis, and Tunisians had increased and that Turkey was beginning to disregard its informal arrangement with the UNHCR. Indeed, just seven months after Amnesty published its report, the Turkish government introduced the 1994 Asylum Regulation.[
Turkish asylum policy improved over the course of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, like the Iranian exodus three decades earlier, hinges on the relationship between Turkey and Europe, a relationship that is once again making life precarious for refugees. Since the 1990s, Turkey has only become a more important transit hub for refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, and environmental refugees. And as the lines between these categories blur, Turkey still maintains its geographic limitation. For its part, the European Union—in disturbing echoes of the 1980s—seeks to establish quid pro quo agreements with Turkey to keep refugees outside Fortress Europe. From the Turkish perspective, the European Union demands that Turkey maintain an open-door policy on its eastern frontier, while on its western border it is to keep the gates to Europe barred. In the turmoil of the Turkish-EU relationship, refugees suffer. In 2016, Amnesty International published reports detailing widespread allegations of refoulement of Syrians by the Turkish authorities. Thirty years later, the details have changed, but the dynamics remain the same (Amnesty International 2016).
The injection of human rights language into the work of the UNHCR altered the functioning of the global refugee system. In Turkey, while human rights advocacy increased policy protections for refugees, contradictions in practice placed restrictions on the system, creating real dangers for refugees. Understanding human rights not just as a collection of documents and norms but as political tools used by state and non-state actors alike to forward their own ends allows us to analyze how human rights discourse has acted and still acts as a mechanism in the global system of refugee movement. Western European and North American governments selectively utilize parts of two discreet discourses—refugee protection and human rights—and in so doing they facilitate a breakdown in the willingness of states, like Turkey, to protect either.
By Bennett G. Sherry
Reported by Author
